Let me stick a big ol’ disclaimer on myself.
I am not a professional pray-er. In fact, I’m a fairly pathetic pray-er. Most of the time I think “I need to pray about that later!” and then never do. If we were all sitting in a circle, I would be the first to say “Hello, my name is Stephanie and I struggle with prayer.”
The past week I’ve spent time with a notebook and pen, keeping my heart open and listening to the Spirit {that is prayer!} and compiling thoughts about prayer to share with you. Let me tell you. My outlook on prayer has changed because of it.
You guys, prayer is dangerous. God is actually listening. Not just that, but he’s watching. Nehemiah 1:6 tells us that: “let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying.” Our lives become ceaseless prayers when we seek God in the ordinary, everyday, miniscule moments of life. But when we take the time to stop and share with the Lord in quiet, intimate moments, we sometimes don’t know the implications of our prayers. We think we know what we are praying for, but we tend to focus more on the destination than the journey.
God cares about the destination, don’t get me wrong. He just seems to be so much more concerned with the journey.
That is why when I ask the Lord to increase my patience, for example, he does not knock on my door and hand me patience nestled in a cutely wrapped box. When I ask of God “help me be patient!” he will hook me up with the people who have the highest capacity to piss me off.
This summer I worked at summer camp, and I was in charge of treating any campers that have lice. Sometimes we are in one room for over twenty-four hours. It’s intense {if this was real life, I would make an in-tents joke right now}. One Monday, before the campers arrived and we were praying, I asked for patience. Two sentences later I was begging God to forget that I had asked for patience, trying to convince him that I was really alright how I was.
That’s the danger in God seeing our prayers. Clearly he is not blind to the fact that I am incredibly impatient.
So guess what happened. We had the most frustrating camper ever. She cried when we touched her hair, but she had the worst case of lice I’d ever seen. My goal with lice-check is to never send a camper home, but she was lying on the floor refusing to let us continue treating her, and I said to my boss, “give me the keys to a camp van and I will personally drive her home myself. I’m not doing this anymore.”
Then the Holy Spirit broke through the thick, bitter walls around my heart.
“Really?”
I sighed and I looked at the 8-year-old girl and said, “Lord, help me see her how you see her right now. Help me to understand.”
Guess what. She stayed. She got her hair treated, and she had an awesome time at camp.
The problem is I often forget prayer is not a persuasive conversation with God. We don’t pray to get what we want, we pray so we can see what God sees. It doesn’t change who God is. It changes who we are.
Madeleine L’Engle, my FAVORITE author, says in one of her books that prayer is not magic, it is an act of love. I pray because I love the people around me {aren’t we all better friends when we have a healthy prayer life?} and I pray because I love God.
I want the fruit of the Spirit, which is what God wants of me as well. God gives us some gardening tools and seeds where we expect a basket full of ripe, juicy fruit. But we have a history of mistreating fruit that God gives us easy access to. So the journey is important, the process becomes the purpose of prayer.
Prayer changes things, no doubt, but the biggest result of prayer is that it changes US.
